2010 « Black Clock

Archive for 2010—

The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog

pippoetry.blogspot.com

This blog is maintained by Douglas Messerli, publisher of Green Integer Books. Green Integer is an independent and innovative press based in Los Angeles that has an enormous catalogue and excellent design aesthetic. The blog focuses on twentieth century poets, established but for the most part obscure, whose innovative work Messerli feels deserves a wider readership. Many of them have not been translated into English, or only haphazardly, so the blog is of special interest to fans of international literature.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

image is of the similarly-named but very different Pip from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

In Sanity We Trust: How Literature Keeps L.A. (Relatively) Sane

‘Literary’ might not be the first adjective that comes to mind when describing the city of Los Angeles. But it should be. Sure, there’s Hollywood, the ‘industry’ (both film and porn), the celebrities, the hopeful Midwestern waiters and waitresses working various restaurants throughout the city. You know the L.A. Myth: Being discovered at LAX or the Chevron on Melrose. Becoming an overnight success. From all over the world, people flock to Los Angeles, hoping to benefit from its limitless possibilities. They cash their savings, stuff it into a white legal envelope and head to L.A. Five days later and a hundred dollars or so shorter, they arrive.

What is missing from the stereotypical image of Los Angeles is the literature that gives voice to its less optimistic outcomes. Often grim and sometimes dark, writers frequently portray the other Los Angeles—the one that’s a bit mysterious, that precisely opposes the illusion of glamour. Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion—without their narratives, L.A. might only be the perpetual and intangible fantasy Hollywood has falsely promised. Instead, literature allows Los Angeles to be multi-faceted; shaded and darkly nuanced. So much so that this city could hardly be what it is today without the stories in which it has starred.

Take Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, which chronicles the fame-induced ennui of movie star Maria, who struggles with the emptiness of success. Or Charles Bukowski’s chronically belligerent protagonists as they lose menial jobs, battle poverty, and chase women. While the showbiz side of Los Angeles touts unrealistic ideals of success and stardom, the literary side of the city paints a bleaker portrait. Add to the list Raymond Chandler’s gangsters, dangerous femme fatales, and corrupt policemen and it’s clear that this is not exactly the stuff dreams are made of. Stuff that probably wouldn’t procure a cross-country bus trip and an envelope stuffed with cash. So what then, is it worth?

A great deal. Imagine this place if it was only the concept of Hollywood. Only naive hopeful stars. Only celebrities. That is just not the Los Angeles I know. The L.A. I know is one of spotlighting helicopters; wailing police sirens; autonomic traffic; an overwhelming amount of people; the consistent smell of skunk, broken-in cars, a homeless epidemic, and a keening ability to decipher gang graffiti tags. I love my L.A., but it isn’t very glamorous. Success is slow. Fame amiss. I have yet to be discovered. I’ve seen a celebrity or two, but they both looked tired. Reality exists in my Los Angeles.

The city lies at the crux of this clashing of constructs. There’s the promise of stardom and the often-bleak reality its literature depicts. Los Angeles constantly shifts between these two spheres. Which explains why this city simultaneously attracts and repels me. It is at times beautiful, and at others grotesque. It is suddenly perfect and a moment later all wrong. It is a city in a constant state of confounding confliction. And if you catch it at the right time, you can see the real L.A., which is everything: the success, the squalor, the fame, the infamy, the power and the poverty. The underbelly is at the heart of Los Angeles just as much as the celebrity.

The gritty Los Angeles depicted is, put simply, better than any myth. The real L.A. is culture. It’s street cart oranges, cheap beer, food trucks. It’s the post office, the alleyway, the dive bar. This grit is what makes Los Angeles gleam. Because it’s what actually awaits you when you get here. And the result is an ideal atmosphere for creativity and imagination that is optimal terrain for writers. With an abundance of contradictions, juxtapositions and opposites, the city holds a wealth of inspiration. And in turn, stories of hardship and scandal allow L.A. to be accessed and understood—to exist just as much on the ground as in the clouds. And if this is the L.A. you come for, your white envelope might take you a bit farther than if you come looking for glamour.

Los Angeles’ literary heritage provides the anti-myth. The down-and-outs. The proclivity for dereliction. The dangers of excess. Without these stories, our conception of Los Angeles might be downright dull. Without Raymond Chandler’s noir or ‘The Poet Laureate of Skid Row’s’ vulgarity, what kind of L.A. would come to mind? Call it dark, dreary or depressing, but give it credit for the insight it provides. Because when I read Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, I know his L.A..

They might not warrant prestige or fame—they hardly even sell books—but these bleak stories, quite frankly, keep us grounded. And if there’s one thing we should turn to this city’s literature for, it’s sanity. Yes, sanity. Because it’s the truth; it’s L.A..

by Katie Manderfield
an MFA candidate at CalArts, an editorial assistant for Black Clock, and is constructing an experimental literary journal for women; her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pindeldyboz, 3:AM, and dogmatika

image courtesy of ATomek

Our Ekphrastic Days

In this experiment, Diana Arterian attempts to define the undefinable.

I am a recording. I don’t age. Perhaps the recorded object ages. I don’t.

– David Grubbs, “I Am a Recording. I Don’t Age.”

“A desert wind rippled across Lake Mead and through the tamarisk on the shore. Dotted through the reedy grass, the ghostly foundations of the once buried Mormon town of St. Thomas now, with the water level falling, returned like a rude reminder of all the secrets this place kept.”

– Chris Abani, “A Path of Shells”

“Could be the Olympics. Jaime Rubin lifts his empty glass to torch-height, hoists what he thinks are his famously emphatic eyebrows and bawls toward Kenny the bartender, ‘Yo, Kelsoe! A round for the house! Davis is buying!’”

– Lou Mathews, “Hollywoodski”

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

There is a reason why ekphrasis is as an ancient practice that still thrives today; it is never easy to define the essence of things. It is also difficult to pinpoint what draws us to one work and not another. And this is no less true in defining the aesthetic of Black Clock and my appreciation of it.

Black Clock bears images that are often blurred and rarely show a person’s face, but rather their environment within a space; pieces of something larger, these images have an allure that makes us want to understand the greater picture. But there is something more to it that I am interested in investigating.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I started by looking through photographs that I have taken over the years that are my aesthetic and my style of photography, but also bear similar characteristics to the images in Black Clock, and so are akin to its eluding aesthetic. I then took these photographs and matched them with the first lines of stories printed in issue 11 of Black Clock.

I paired the first photograph, taken in Washington, DC near the Smithsonian Museum, with the first line of David Grubbs’ “I am a Recording. I Don’t Age.” because it’s such a strange image and without the children’s faces, it seems almost as if they are ageless themselves.

The second pairing is of a photograph taken in an abandoned home at the Rodeo Grounds commune in Topanga Canyon with the first sentence of Chris Abani’s “A Path of Shells.” I chose to put these two together because Abani describes an abandoned place and the photo is of an abandoned place being taken over by nature.

In perhaps the most literal pairing of the three, I combined the third photograph, taken in the Cha Cha Lounge in Silver Lake, with Lou Mathews’ “Hollywoodski” because the initial scene in the story takes place in a bar.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

I am still uncertain that I can articulate the aesthetic of Black Clock (or perhaps the aesthetic of anything); however, I believe I can at least “capture” it. Sometimes in understanding our connection to a work, it is useful to emulate it through a process that starts with ourselves.

by Diana Arterian
who is currently earning her MFA in Poetry at CalArts and assists California Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes;
her self-published chapbook First Wind is available at Skylight Books

Listen to BC 11

It’s undeniable that music influences our sensory experience of the world–especially when we are in the position of the receiver of information. This is to say, it doesn’t take a professional film critic to know that the score or soundtrack is just about as important as what is being visually presented on the screen. What is thought about less often, perhaps, is music’s tie to the reading experience. To be sure, there is a great contingent of readers who prefer not to allow music to mingle with their experience of a text. However, a well-picked (or coincidentally synced) music selection can enhance our consumption of what’s on the page. As such, I’d like to offer the following playlist for Black Clock 11.

1. “NYC” by Interpol
2. “Sleep Alone” by Moby
3. “Twice” by Little Dragon
4. “Despicable Dogs” by Small Black
5. “Naked If I Want To” by Cat Power
6. “The Times They Are A-Changing” by Bob Dylan
7. “Graceland” by Paul Simon
8. “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” by Stevie Wonder
9. “Border Guards by The Rosebuds
10. “By This River” by Brian Eno
11. “Aperture” by Wes Willenbring
12. “We Have A Map of the Piano” by Mum
13. “Tomorrowtoday (part 2)” by Triosk
14. “Masonic Funeral Music” performed by Herbert Von Karajan; Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
15. “Down the Line” by Jose Gonzalez

Track 1 rides the energy of issue 11’s first two pieces, while tracks 2 and 3 span the flow and length of Jenny Burman, Joanna Scott, and Veronica Gonzalez’s pieces. Track 4 picks up with the mood of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s piece. Track 5, Cat Power’s second cover of Moby Grape’s “Naked If I Want To” fittingly takes us into David Grubb’s meditation on the immortality of the recording. Tracks 6, 7, and 8 lift us up for Greil Marcus’s reflection on Election night. The twang of the Dylan track, referenced in the piece, flows into Paul Simon’s sweetly hopeful song for “Graceland;” and both of these tracks culminate in the campaign’s anthem, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.” The pace begins to slow and the mood sombers with track 9 and Danielle Blau’s piece. Tracks 10, 11, and 12, and 13, take us through the magazine’s next five pieces. Track 14, an eerie classical composition, submerges us in Chris Abani’s piece, and track 15 launches us into Richard Powers’s novel excerpt, with the rush of being onboard a plane, fidgeting, glancing out the window, and a sense of impossible height.

by Mallory Farrugia
a writer and freelance editor living in Venice, CA

The Soul of a Man

i’ve got too many girlfriends
who’d be cool chicks if they weren’t such cunts
Ah, bowl of dicks,
they mean nothin, baby.
It was Halloween on the blue Nile, you know how it gets.
i’ll deposit the pictures i took in my spank bank.
the female form looks best behind a shower curtain.

i feel worse than i’ve ever felt.
____________________ all i want is whiskey cigarettes and records. and to not wake up tomorrow.
____________________ dear lord, give me the strength to get the fuck out of town
____________________ and by strength i mean money.
____________________ pick me up take me out fuck me up.

____________________ if i could only put the wood to a quality broad
____________________ then get breakfast and clean laundry
____________________ then i’d be ready
____________________ to rape and pillage the world

I. PURPOSE + HYPOTHESIS

Lyric poetry as it is currently defined – a brief, polished statement of intense emotion – was a form cemented in the Romantic period of the 19th century. Lyric poetry existed long before that, of course; some of the oldest extant examples of Greek verse were considered “lyric,” in that they were short pieces composed for accompaniment with a lyre. The form originated among ancient writers who wished to spurn the grandiose requirements of the epic form, or the tight constraints of the elegy or trochaic and iambic, which were public forms, written for recitation at specific occasions. The lyric poem as private expression reached its apotheosis in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and was subsequently popularized by a roster of immortals: poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Baudelaire. Where is the lyric form now, though? The Modernists reviled the form, and while it was briefly revived in the confessional works of mid-century writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, it has certainly fallen out of fashion among the vanguard of compositional practice. My hypothesis is that, while lyric poetry no longer dominates the institutionalized study or practice of the art of poetry, lyrical expression has seeped irrevocably into the mainstream of popular culture, through the prevalence of outlets like twitter and the facebook “status update.”

Venues like these have opened up an avenue of personal expression in which the sharer displays to the world their private thoughts, joys, torments, or inanities. A constriction is placed upon length, and the well-crafted status update can grant an air of import to the most banal of everyday occurrences. That anyone should consider their own private thoughts worthy of public consumption has always been the motivating force behind lyric composition. As such, the rolling status update can be seen as a sort of fragmented lyric poem, an ongoing exposition of crafted, emotive sharing. My purpose in this experiment is to display this through the creation of poem comprised entirely of another person’s status updates. The intent in utilizing an anonymous person’s outpourings is to showcase the lyricism inherent in this form, without falling back on artificial poesy.

II. MATERIALS + METHODS

I chose a single person from my “friends” whose status updates are often evocative or amusing. Using Facebook’s archives of this person’s posts (nothing ever disappears from Facebook) I traveled back through the months and extracted updates according to whim. Once I had amassed a certain amount of material, I arranged a poem. Not a single word has been cut from or added to the original updates.

III. RESULTS

Please see above.

IV. CONCLUSION

Profundity is everywhere. The final product revealed, in concentrated form, the thought cycles and relative emotional state of the updater.

by Doug Matus
a writer from Texas who now lives in Los Angeles

“Vis-À-Vis: A Day With French + American Writers” (5/15@11AM)

when– May 15, 2010, 11:00am-6:00pm
where Los Angeles

Free and open to the public, “Vis-À-Vis” is a day-long literary festival featuring readings, debates and conversations with ten prominent contemporary French / Francophone and American writers, including Black Clock editor Steve Erickson with Philippe Djian and Norman Klein taking on “The Novel vs. Cinema and Television” at Consortium Gallery (1100 Abbott Kinney,Venice, CA, 90291).

For more information and a complete schedule, visit: http://visavisla.blogspot.com/

Hey, this cookie is a book!

As readers, writers, and literature lovers, we have all had our lit-geek moments, whether it’s naming our dog after the protagonist in our favorite book or laughing at an obscure authorial reference in a movie. Some of the most rewarding moments, however, occur when we stumble across literature in decidedly non-literary places. The following is a random, by no means definitive, list of examples.

1) As I Lay Dying
This one’s a freebie. Yep, it’s a band. And a William Faulkner novel.

2) Myths of the Near Future
It’s a short story collection by J.G. Ballard, but it’s also the debut album name of the indie British band, Klaxons, as listed in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Bonus points: Track 1 of the album, “Atlantis to Interzone,” refers to both Atlantis, the mythical lost city, and Interzone, a short story collection by William S. Burroughs, while Track 7, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” is named after Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel of the same name.

3) Lorna Doone
An amazingly tasty, buttery shortbread cookie by Nabisco. Also a 1869 novel by Richard Doddridge Blackmore. The book’s full title is Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. Who would have known?

4) Taylor Swift’s Love Story
Couldn’t resist this one. Sure, the whole song draws unabashed comparisons to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but did anyone else notice the subtle, one-time reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter? “Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter/And my daddy said stay away from Juliet”… Sorry for getting it stuck in your head.

5) The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus
The aforementioned walrus in this brilliant, famous, clearly acid-inspired song is a reference to the walrus in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There? Apparently, John Lennon didn’t realize that the walrus was a bad guy at the time, and he thought to himself, “Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said ‘I am the carpenter.’” Beatles fans around the world thank Lennon for his mistake.

6) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
While we’re on the subject of Lewis Carroll, it seems fitting to mention that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have been influential enough to warrant a Wikipedia page entitled Works based on Alice in Wonderland. From a neurological condition called “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” to Salvador Dalí’s illustrations based on Alice in Wonderland to Gwen Stefani’s Alice-inspired video for “What You Waiting For?” the unexpected references are endless.

Lit-geek-out and share your literary references in non-literary places with us and the world by leaving a comment or tweeting @blackclockmag.

by Chrysanthe Tan
a singer-songwriter, actor, violinist, poet, Pisces, and Star Wars enthusiast

John Haskell On, Below + Above the Surface

John Haskell is the author of the novels American Purgatorio and Out of My Skin, as well as a collection of short stories entitled I Am Not Jackson Pollock. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Bomb and The Believer, and he is a currently teaching writing and literature at Columbia University.

BLACK CLOCK: So you’re quite the rambling man – living in San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Has travel or living in such disparate environments changed the way you approach your writing?

JOHN HASKELL: Travel broadens the mind. Or, if it doesn’t, at least you see different places, and if you open your eyes, a different place can be a different world and seeing a different world does influence my work. Writing fiction is about creating worlds and yes, someone can write about one world and make that world real and believable and fantastic, but for me, seeing and being in “disparate” places has changed the way I see my own world, in that I see my reality as comprised of many worlds, some below the surface, some above the surface, some right on the surface, but still different, still amazing, still full of those things a rambling man can take in and live with.

In both American Purgatorio and Out of My Skin, the main characters seem to be interested in the malleability of reality – what is perceived or believed to be the truth, is in fact the truth. Was there any particular source, experience, or idea that you were inspired by which helped form the unique inner logic of these characters?:

All the sources and experiences and inspirations of mine (and my characters) get thrown into a blender and mixed up so completely that I can’t say where they come from, or even if they come from anywhere. Logic comes from life, and the experiences and thoughts and forms of that life and too complicated to be so clear about. Life is confusing if you try to make too much sense of it, and although I sometimes get confused, I try to react differently.

What really interests me about your characters is that they seem to have a public life which they present to everyone and a very different private life inside their heads. They have elaborate facades, which I guess we all do, or a layering of their personality that is visible to the reader. Even in I Am Not Jackson Pollock, the famous people that you write about already have a public persona or story that most of us are already aware of but in that particular collection we are suddenly privy to their fictionalized private life — which is voyeuristic and above all, very intriguing.

What excites you about creating characters like this? Or what excited you about particular real people such as Jackson Pollock, Janet Leigh, and others whom you have breathed new life into?

You talk about the private life that is inside the heads of the characters and the public life that these characters present to the world but for me it doesn’t seem like that. Not exactly. Maybe there’s the aware world and the unaware world, and I’m trying to get to the unaware world and shine some light on it. I agree that we all live with a certain amount of façade, and certainly in the Pollock stories, because the characters are usually famous, there is that dichotomy – we know the history of the people and the movies they made, and I was trying to get below that, but not to show a private side so much as to show the same side, or maybe the underside that everyone has. What excites me about that – it’s not excitement, although I like that you said that – but more like what interested me were the real people I wrote about, and I picked them for a variety of reasons: I saw the film in which Topsy was electrocuted, my aunt was a John Keats scholar, people used to tell me I looked like Tony Perkins, I saw a great painting about Paris, the Greek, and I like haikus and Basho is a fabulous haiku poet. When I try to write a story that doesn’t get to something I find interesting – I’m bored. All those people/characters got under my skin, or I let them burrow into my brain, and then by looking closely, I could begin to see that private side, or more accurately the real-life interior that meant something to me.

Some of the stories in I Am Not Jackson Pollock were originally monologues. Do you often keep performance in mind when writing? Do you think anything is gained or lost when these stories are silently read on the page?

I don’t think about performance, but I think about the sound of the voice. I hear the writing, and in fact, often read what I’ve written out loud. All writing is a kind of performance, but a performance for the reader, to read the text in a way that will mean the most to that reader. And yes, something is lost when the stories are read silently, but that’s up to the reader. Maybe something is gained, in terms of thoughtfulness, or stillness, or contemplation. I like the “out loud” aspect, but it’s certainly not the only way to go.

Could you explain a little about your Psycho website? What was the concept behind it?

Many, many years ago, I thought that the internet, that new invention filled with hypertext ideas and optimistic notions, could be a way to use and possibly transform writing. The website hasn’t changed since those optimistic and amateurish days.

You had thought the internet could transform writing — how did it not? What was the effect that was achieved (or non-effect)?

I was entranced by the idea of a new way of writing, a new way of thinking about stories. When the internet happened, and that included hypertext ideas, there was a kind of anything-is-possible feeling. So I put together that website from scratch by cutting and pasting other websites and finding pictures. I don’t think it “works,” but reading is old-fashioned, and although Kindles may take over, it’s still reading. Having said that, who knows what reading and writing will be like in fifty years?

Movies are brought up a lot in your writing. How do you see other mediums, like film, interacting with literature? Or even multi-media interacting (the combination of movies, internet, literature)?

I see movies as an extension of life. If I walk down a street and someone stops to talk with me, or I see someone bend down and pick up a guitar pick or someone in a movie refuses to light someone’s cigarette, it’s all part of the same canvas that I can use to transform what I experience into art, or at least into writing. True, life is what gives a person the experience, but that’s not wholly accurate because anything gives someone an experience. Maybe you have to, say, have been in love, to be affected by a love story, so they go hand-in-hand. Movies and literature (and the internet and games and dance and theater and puppet shows) walk hand-in-hand. Because we make literature doesn’t mean that’s the only place to look for inspiration.

by Ashley Tomeck
an MFA candidate at CalArts with an unearthly penchant for snow and a writer of short fiction that often incorporates elements of the fantastic and bizarre

The 13th Hour: Black Clock Blog Launch Party (5/16@5pm)

when _ _ May 16, 2010 @ 5:00pm
where _- the wulf
_______ 1026 South Santa Fe Ave
_______ Los Angeles, CA 90021
_______ tel. +212 431 5270

Admission is free.

The 13th hour is HERE. Join Black Clock for a night of new media in wild celebration of our blog launch at the wulf. Writers including Doug Kearney, Emily Kiernan, Katie Manderfield, and Doug Matus will read and perform original work; a reception will follow with music by Wounded Dinosaur.

We will have Anchor Steam Beer on tap and wine.

For more information, please contact Elizabeth Hall at [email protected].

Image courtesy of Eliza Frye

Landfall in NZ

If Black Clock had a foreign older uncle, it would be Landfall of Otago University Press. Founded in 1947, it is New Zealand’s oldest literary magazine. Landfall publishes two, often theme-driven, magazines a year featuring New Zealand’s best contemporary writers – their poetry, prose, and essays – as well as artwork in full color.

Also like Black Clock, Landfall works beyond the stories and poems it publishes – it provides an art-object readers can hold and experience in their hands. The art and captivating layout of each issue saturate the senses with visual and tactile beauty on par with the textual that simply cannot be conveyed on a screen. In so doing, Landfall challenges the print is dead theorists who consider magazines little more than justified text on tree bark.

In a world where the CEO of Amazon can promote the Kindle and the hope of a “paperless society” without destroying his career in bookselling, print magazines such as Landfall and Black Clock inevitably find themselves in the same boat — a beautiful boat, which we’re all proud of and devoted to, but one that consistently faces the challenges of ebooks and an unstable publishing world. It’s heartening to know that in a city over six thousand miles away, a magazine akin to our own continues not only to endure but thrive despite these obstacles.

image from Landfall

Archive for 2010—

The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog

In Sanity We Trust: How Literature Keeps L.A. (Relatively) Sane

Our Ekphrastic Days

Listen to BC 11

The Soul of a Man

“Vis-À-Vis: A Day With French + American Writers” (5/15@11AM)

Hey, this cookie is a book!

John Haskell On, Below + Above the Surface

The 13th Hour: Black Clock Blog Launch Party (5/16@5pm)

Landfall in NZ

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